womanhood

It felt like a tearing and stretching burn when I started to use it again. It was like my trachea was still recovering from how searing my words had been the last time I spoke up. My tongue was heavy and soft, it had lost all it’s sharpness and dexterity. Like learning to walk again, it hurt at first.

By now, you should know this is both a true story about dance and a metaphor. I am a paradox of confidence and innocence, sometimes imagining more quickly than I can learn and sometimes learning more than I can practice. But there are a few things I know to be true.

If you want to build resilience, visit a bar. There are things that sometimes happen in a bar that will make you strong. He looked at the woman to my left and the woman on my right and said ‘You two are amazing girls.’ His pronunciation pointed in a direction anywhere but me.

Still, layered in perfume she is not yet naked before you. She undresses but she does not leave herself unclothed. It is beyond silk and lace, beyond what the skin wears and beyond costume of the day. There are symbols and stories painted on her body in scars and ink; some of them you know but others you have not listened to yet.

Here’s the deal, Kid. I thought you’d be here by now but the truth is, you may never arrive at all. But I’m still your mama – fiercely, entirely and utterly yours. So I wanted to tell you a few things so you’d always know. Like how I want to love you so well and walk with you through all your failures. How I want to teach you everything I’ve learned while waiting for you and how I’m trying to be the best I can be for your sake. So this is for you, kid, love from your Mama.

The trouble with expectations is that they hide in plain sight until you trip on them. Freedom from prescription is essential. Examine every corner of your life for the hidden expectations (your own or others) that you are trying to meet. Find them before they trip you. As I think the next half of my life; I don’t want to spend a minute of my energy or spirit in meeting expectations or prescriptions. I want to live in such a way that I am fully alive and engaged with my greatest strengths. Devoting as much as I have into things that matter most for my legacy, not the legacy others would write or choose for me.

To the woman, unfinished but not incomplete. To you who has loved and lost, chased hope and given up only to have no choice but to try again. Who in finding wisdom has come to know loneliness. You have wandered down the dark alleys and enjoyed the danger there. You are more remarkable than anyone knows – precisely because of how much you let them see, when there is still an ocean beneath the surface of the sea.

I can hardly breathe when she’s in the room. I’m overwhelmed with a sense of envy and admiration for this woman. She is phenomenal. She is loved – loved so hard, and by so many. I’m envious of how I imagine she is loved. Most importantly, she has earned the goodwill of those whom I admire where I have not. I am average beside her. I know the truth of my failings. I know the difference between my aspirations and my reality.

Love is problematic to define these days. A single word has been stretched through the ages to encompass many things that are not love. We have come to know love as a feeling, as many feelings. Feelings of acceptance, belonging, desire, companionship, friendship, trust, fulfilment, lust. Many of these feelings are about the Self, the Ego. In it’s most basic human habit, pursuit of love is an egocentric, the language of love is a lazy lens through which we seek meaning. We hope to satisfy our inner turmoil through external means. As if love applied externally, from outside of us, will heal our wounds and complete our emptiness.

In any of those circumstances, there is a season where your friend is lost to you, replaced by a creature called ‘Stranger That Knows Your Deep Secrets’. Your secrets, once shared in trust between the two of you are now the shared property of your friend and their lover. You have to re-introduce yourself and hope they are equally as trustworthy. You have to hope that they choose to love you, as you choose to love them.

“Still,” he said (being the recipient of a recently shattered heart), “you’ve got to be thankful that you don’t have any of that baggage of poor relationships to carry into the future. Everything’s a fresh clean slate.”

If there is one thing in this world that I know how to do.. it’s crush. I’m really good at seeing the beauty and wonder in the people around me. Still, something in the wind has changed and sometimes love and romance needs a trigger; sex certainly does.

Here’s what you lost at 28 and found at 30 years of age. Here is my pale Scottish skin over strong thighs and proud breasts. Here is an extraordinary, sensitive machine that carries my self, my soul, my sense.